The Elementary OS team has released their latest offering, Luna, which has been in development for a while now. Based on Ubuntu, this Linux distribution aims to develop its own minimalist applications, but it goes beyond that - it has its own desktop environment, window manager, human interface guidelines, APIs, and more. There's an article on their blog detailing the road to Luna.

They've managed to build quite some hype, so let's see if it lives up to it. Does anyone here use it?

Installing Luna has been a Ubuntu-like experience - not really surprising, since it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (don't know, which iteration of 12.04, though).

The UI is very nice and minimalistic. Tinkerers won't be too happy with it, since the only options to change the look is the desktop background and the style of the dock. Anything else needs to be installed from a Ubuntu or Elementary repository.

Luna comes with a couple of apps of their own. Geary, a nice and simple mail client, seems to be designed to work with GMail - it won't work with my (totally regular) IMAP account, though. Elementary's music player imports and sorts all the music on my hard drive all right, but then complains about a missing codec for mp3 (I had checked the approriate option during installation!). And Midori, a Webkit-based browser, is incredibly fast, but so far lacks the option to use extensions or add-ons - which is why I returned to Chromium very quickly.

The minimalistic approach, however, has its upside: on my modest, 4-year-old machine, it seems to be faster than any "regular" Ubuntu flavor or (although that might be just an impression) even Debian. The team did something sensible - leaving out a lot of things that are not really necessary, while leaving it to the user to find and install those things should they become necessary, after all.

as a long-time OS X user, felt at home right away, nice OS X rip-off (down to some icons, although redrawn, looking very familiar)
some stuff is missing though, like option to move the dock to the left/right
vmware performance OK, curious about the performance on old netbook crap I own.

I think it's less "rip off" and more "inspired". Not in the Jobsian sense of inspired, but actually aesthetically pleasing while different enough that you won't get confused which OS you're in unless you leave your glasses in the other room.

I'm actually excited to see this release; previous beta releases would run fine as a live CD and would usually install fine, but the install would then refuse to boot on my workstation. This was really confusing since the OS is based on Ubuntu and all versions from 11.04 through the current release work fine on here. Having it install and run nearly flawlessly made me very happy this weekend when I tried it out.

The only bugs I've found so far are minor. When installed with the option to encrypt the home folder, the passphrase/key script fails to keep the terminal window open. If you already have an open terminal it will stay open but will not run the script. You have to call the script by manually typing it into a terminal window, which is trivial but a bug nonetheless. This bug doesn't appear on stock Ubuntu, and I suspect it has to do with Luna's custom terminal app. Another minor bug has to do with the Luna theme not playing nice with older or non-standard GTK apps, an easy fix with a few tweaks. Again, trivial but annoying.

Overall I really love the balance of eye candy vs simplicity, and I think I might play around with GNUStep some to give this even more of a "Mac feel". Haters can hate, but everyone has an opinion and mine is mostly positive.

Then you'd get lock-in and license requirements and restrictions on the hardware you can install on! You know what's cool? I can image my hard drive directly onto any x86-64 machine and immediately have a fully set up system, without worry. That includes Windows-based programs and games with Crossover Wine.

If Elementary makes a Mac user comfortable and affords those advantages, that's awesome.

I would use it, but their reluctance to respond nicely criticism about the minimize button being completely removed pisses me off.

They expect (and quite arrogantly) all developers to add in "save state" when closing, not many apps do that and they are such a tiny distro...the fact that they expect the big names that everyone uses to do it is a joke.

Mac OSX has the save state feature and they do it right, they keep the minimize button but simply added the feature to the close button - no breaking peoples usual workflow then.

I have pointed out to them time and time again when a minimize button is truly useful, imagine uploading a file via an ftp program, you don't want to close it to stop the transfer but you also don't want it in the way - you minimize it. Just one of many examples, they ignore me everytime I bring that up.

There isn't a simple way to re-enable it by default either.

There is a reason why a plugin to add it back into gnome shell is one of the most popular and why they have re-done the classic mode on gnome shell to include it.

EOS has a proper dock as well unlike gnome shell, where you can minimize by clicking the icon in the dock so the functionality is there, they are just being stupid by removing what everyone is accustomed to.

I have pointed out to them time and time again when a minimize button is truly useful, imagine uploading a file via an ftp program, you don't want to close it to stop the transfer but you also don't want it in the way - you minimize it. Just one of many examples, they ignore me everytime I bring that up.

Why don't you minimize the application by using the dock?

Try reading my post

Try making a better point in your post. If all you want is a minimize button but you can still minimize applications using the dock, then what's the point of your cute little story about the FTP application?

They are confusing to people who have not used a typical gui on a computer.

Most people have figured out guis on computers, and thus are not confused anymore. If they haven't, they have to learn how they work for most systems ( with a minimize button), as thats how they work on the vast majority of computers. As someone that taught users that had never seen a computer before, this is quite the problem. I really wanted to teach them FOSS software as its free ( in cost ), but everywhere else they go in life they'd be working with windows ( pirated windows). So you can't do things better, if they're never going to have the opportunity to use the better solution the rest of their lives.

The Mac "close button doesn't close app" thing pissed me off the first time I had to deal with it, but I grew to love it because it streamlined my workflow and saved my ass a couple of times.

I do think Elementary should make it easier to add a minimize button for the masses, but I don't miss it. I'm more of an alt+tab-er than a minimizer; in fact I'm more at home at the keyboard than the mouse owing to my first 12 or so years of computing at a command prompt. I didn't use a GUI on a regular basis until around 1994.

When i saw the video about the instantly starting programs i was enthusiastic to try it out myself. But now I have it installed on one of my partitions (which I use to tryout new operating systems), I am quit disappointed. The instantly starting programs actually take quiet some time to open, the smoothness is nowhere to be found and I have a lot of stutter. Ubuntu is more smooth and also my primary OS Debian works better. Conclusion: Not really to recommend

The instantly starting programs actually take quiet some time to open, the smoothness is nowhere to be found and I have a lot of stutter. Ubuntu is more smooth and also my primary OS Debian works better. Conclusion: Not really to recommend

Are you have Radeon, or Intel? On Luna from livecd speed is about the same as on Fedora 19 & Gnome Shell from hard drive. On plain nouveau. So it's WOW for me. Too bad I don't really like this MacOSXish stuff.

Paid 10 bucks anyway. And I gladly pay again for replacing that ugly Unity toppanel. Then we'll talk.

The overall theme looks like the old Uno theme for OS X (which I used and liked very much) and the dock is quite similar to the OS X 2D dock.

I like the consistency overall but my biggest gripe about Linux on the desktop has always been the app stability, not so much the desktop/environment look at feel.

I use Linux on all our servers but I've always just found it hard to use on the Desktop because, honestly, the overall stability and functionality of apps on Mac OS X has been so much better (and since Max OS X is basically unix underneath the UI I can use all the same apps command line (and even the odd X app) I use on Linux).